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The gun pipeline: Popular Hi-Point guns ‘cheap and they work’

Once smuggled to Toronto from U.S., a $150 Hi-Point will sell for 10 times as much.

The .45-calibre Hi-Point with an after-market laser sight attached to the barrel that was found in Chris Burnett's car at the Windsor border.

This 9-mm Hi-Point had one bullet in the magazine and one in the chamber when it was found in Chris Burnett's car as he tried to cross the Windsor border.

Toronto native Chris Burnett, who helped lead his Brampton high school football team to back-to-back championships, was found at the Windsor border with two Hi-Point guns behind the CD player in his car, and on Oct. 12, 2012, was sentenced to three years in prison.

By David Bruser and Jayme PoissonStaff Reporters

Sun., April 21, 2013

Chris Burnett sat in an interrogation room, dry-heaving and fighting back tears.

A Canada Border Services investigator placed a waste bin beside the football player’s chair in case he vomited.

“I never seen it. I didn’t know. I didn’t put it there,” Burnett told his interrogators.

A short while earlier, the Toronto native had arrived at the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel border crossing in his blue Suzuki Sidekick. A border officer sent Burnett, a linebacker playing on scholarship for the Wayne State University Warriors in Detroit, for secondary inspection.

They found a .45-calibre handgun with an after-market laser sight attached to the barrel, and a 9-mm — with one bullet in the magazine and one in the chamber.

The guns, with a black polymer frame and metal slide, were made in Ohio by Hi-Point, a cheap brand commonly used by Toronto criminals.

“YOU’VE ARRIVED AT HI-POINT”

The Ohio gun maker’s website continues:

“Hi-Point offers affordably priced semi-automatic handguns in a range of the most popular calibres . . . Whichever model you choose, you are assured of reliability and accuracy at an affordable price.”

That they are not especially known for their elegance matters little to Toronto criminals or their stateside suppliers.

“I can go into a (Michigan) gun store and (legally) buy a $150 semi-automatic, cheap, a Hi-Point. That seems to be one of the cheapest handguns you can purchase brand-new,” said Special Agent Mark Jackson of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. “The things seem to be pretty popular because of their price.”

Toronto police firearms expert Michael Press recently testified in a gun possession case that he often sees the lower-quality Hi-Points, their handles cracked and taped, coming into the station.

Hi-Point spokesman Charles Brown said “just because a firearm is less expensive it does not make it junk. Hi-Point firearms are, and have been, made of the same high-quality material as other much more expensive firearms.”

Once smuggled to Toronto, where supply cannot pace demand, a $150 Hi-Point can sell for 10 times as much.

“You can see the profit,” agent Jackson said. “That’s just pure economics.”

A Star investigation has found Hi-Points headed for Toronto are originally sold in pawnshops as far south as Mississippi and Georgia and ending up in the hands of local teens and criminals with prior convictions.

Hi-Point’s Charles Brown said the company works closely with police agencies to help “catch and convict those who misuse our product,” adding that “Hi-Point was one of the first firearms companies to . . . have a hidden serial number in their firearms to help law enforcement catch and convict criminals.”

In recent years, Hi-Point handguns have been among the most commonly seized by Toronto police.

In 2010, while Toronto police raided a Beresford Ave. apartment, Coady Duhamel threw a plastic Foot Locker bag from a deck, and the bag snagged on the barbed wire of a nearby fence. Inside the bag were 137 grams of cocaine, and a fully loaded .45-calibre semi-automatic Hi-Point handgun.

Duhamel was found guilty of possessing the gun. At the time of his arrest, he was out on bail after being charged with theft and subject to a weapons ban stemming from a previous conviction. A judge sentenced him to seven years in prison.

In the summer of 2009, 18-year-old Ibrahim Sadat and 20-year-old Michael Mensah, who had a prior firearms-related conviction, were found in a stolen car parked outside a McDonald’s on Jane St. near Wilson Ave. Police found a loaded 9-mm on the floorboard in front of the passenger seat, and a fully loaded .40-calibre Hi-Point handgun inside a backpack on the rear seat. A judge sentenced both to seven years in prison.

In these Toronto cases, it is not known who supplied Hi-Point handguns to the accused.

Several months later, in an interrogation room at the border, Burnett said he did not know guns were in his vehicle. Later he would testify that someone, maybe a roommate, had put the Hi-Points in his dashboard. That someone, maybe a roommate, used his cellphone to send text messages about the gun deal. That someone, maybe associates of his roommates, planned on retrieving the guns from his Suzuki once he crossed the border.

On April 27, 2010, the day after Burnett’s arrest, while his cellphone sat in an evidence locker, it received a text from someone in Ohio named “Big Daddy Frost”:

“What’s good dog? Got you the boys 9s and 40s brand new. How many you want?”

Dedicated to football and school, his friends and family said. Focused, hard-working, trustworthy.

“Burnie,” as some friends called him, doted on his mother, who lived in Brampton, and, when his busy schedule permitted, visited his sister in a mental health facility.

Burnett’s claim that he was an unwitting accomplice to gun trafficking was not credible, Justice Joseph Donohue said during the 2012 trial.

Burnett had “not one but two guns. They were both loaded and they were handguns, the nature of which is used only for killing citizens . . . There was only one possible purpose for this transportation, and that was to earn some money.”

The judge found Burnett, who helped lead his Brampton high school to back-to-back championships, guilty of all charges, and on Oct. 12, 2012, sentenced him to three years in prison.

His mother, Phyllis, was at times inconsolable when the Star called and asked for comment.

The Hi-Point 9-mm found in Burnett’s dashboard traces to a Mississippi pawnshop, where it was originally sold in 2006. The Hi-Point .45-calibre traces to Arrowhead Pawnshop in Jonesboro, Ga., close to Interstate 75, where it was originally sold in 2004.

How they ended up in Detroit several years later, whether the guns were stolen, how many hands they passed through before ending up in Burnett’s dash, are all unknowns.

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